Strengthening IP is contentious.
Mandel 14 [Gregory N. Mandel, Provost of Temple University and Laura H. Carnell Professor of Law at Temple Law School. Prior to serving as Provost, he was Dean of Temple’s Beasley School of Law for five years. Provost Mandel is a leading international scholar on intellectual property law, innovation, and the interface among technology and law. His publications have been selected as among the best intellectual property and patent law articles of the year three times. His article Patently Non-Obvious was identified as one of the most cited patent law articles of the past decade, and his experimental studies have been cited by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and in briefs filed before the United States Supreme Court. “The Public Perception of Intellectual Property,” Florida Law Review, Vol. 66, Is. 1, (2014). https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1178&context=flr]
In a world where intellectual property rights have become significantly more prevalent, important, and contentious, the experiments reported here shed new light on the popular understanding of intellectual property law and intellectual property rights. This study has significant implications for intellectual property law and policy, as the intellectual property system is premised on producing a certain set of behavioral effects. The results of this study indicate that the behavioral model of incentives on which the intellectual property system is based cannot function optimally because popular conceptions of intellectual property rights are not in accord with actual intellectual property law. This discord can destabilize the legitimacy and the effectiveness of intellectual property law.
The variance found here between public perception and intellectual property law indicates that potential intellectual property producers likely do not receive appropriate incentives to engage in creative endeavors, to work with others on creative projects, or to commercialize and distribute their intellectual work. Likewise, intellectual property users likely do not receive appropriate signals concerning compliance with intellectual property rights. These public perceptions are also highly likely to influence juror, as well as some judicial and legislative, decision-making concerning intellectual property rights. The intellectual property system will remain hard-pressed to achieve its objectives given the widespread disconnect between the public psychology of intellectual property and the reality of intellectual property law.